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Monthly Archives: November 2014

As I am working on transitioning out of my internship, I have the opportunity to better define the internship role for my successor. One of the things I discussed was changing the title of the role from Social Media Intern to something that goes beyond social media and that really reflects the support role this intern will play for the OCLS librarians and staff.

While the majority of my work was focused on social media, we discovered that there were other responsibilities and needs for the position, and that the title was just too narrow to define these needs. One of the things I enjoyed was being able to teach a learning tutorial for distance learners. I would hope that future interns will be able to do this as well. Additionally, I can see the value in creating online tutorials for YouTube or perhaps adding LibGuides content.

So what will the name of this position be? I am still unsure of what I will suggest, but hopefully it will reflect well on the intern and the OCLS.

As can be expected in every work place (especially virtual ones), you’ll come across a stretch of time where things just do not line up. The past couple weeks have been like that. My duties at my internship have been at the minimum amount of effort due to this cold I have been fighting off for weeks, the sleepless nights working on my ePortfolio, my supervisor being out of the office attending to her job duties, and the workload of my job.

That being said, my supervisor has been very understanding and supportive, especially where it comes to the time commitment of the ePort. Now that I have finished, we are ready to get back on track for the final few weeks of the internship. We will be meeting this week to discuss our collaboration on a journal article and for succession planning. I am excited about both of these topics. I have not had the experience of writing for a scholarly journal, so I am a bit frightened. However, I think that comes from a desire to do a good job, so that I will take a positive. For succession planning, I am looking through my old class lists and seeing if there is anyone who has not yet graduated who may be interested in this position. Additionally, since I am the first intern, I wish to develop an outline of basic job duties for future interns, as well as create a quick start guide so they can hit the ground running.

One of the great things about social media is that it’s, well, social. When you have a chance to cross-promote with another partner, I am realizing the importance of taking advantage of those opportunities.

The OCLS is part of a much larger organization (The University of Maine System), and as such is linked through the parent organization and all of the brothers, sisters, cousins, or however you may look at them. This means of of the University’s campuses, all of the libraries from those campuses, and all of their departments, faculty, etc. For weeks I have been building up the following for OCLS on Facebook, helping re-post articles and photos from other pages. The great thing is that this is not without reciprocation. The Universities put out e-newsletters, and the OCLS (as well as other services, departments, etc.) is given a small amount of space to “advertise” our services. So for the past couple weeks I have been creating little blurbs about our services for these publications.

It seems like such a small task to write 4 or 5 lines about such things as how to reach us for questions, using RefWorks, or how to narrow down a search. However, as I’ve seen with our Facebook posts, so much has to be crammed into such a short space in order to grab and hold the attention of the viewers. I hope my efforts prove to be a benefit to the OCLS. I just wish there was a way to track how many people will be reached through these blurbs.

This last week I had the opportunity to attend the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey. It was a great opportunity for networking and to absorb a lot of new ideas about the field I am studying. I also took this as an opportunity to gather information that could prove useful in my internship. While there were no sessions that seemed to specifically address my needs (there were sessions on using Twitter and for building better websites), I was able to find some interesting topics. Here is a list of sessions I attended:

Evolving Libraries Delivering New Experiences

Digitizing Local Content

Community Management, More than Libraries

Getting MOOC’ed: Free Online Training

Unifying UX: Consistency with Content

Gathering and Presenting User Input

Engaging Stories Info Blitz

Reaching Users with Mobile Technology

Building a 21st Century Library

Making Libraries, Making Makers

Academic Libraries: Totally Virtual & Hacked

I try to take in a variety of new experiences at conferences. I was somewhat disappointed at a couple of these sessions sounding less like case-studies and more like product placement. However, from these sessions, the keynote addresses, and networking with colleagues, I am still absorbing information. I think it can be safe to say that libraries that have a good vision of the future and a willingness to adopt technological advances are going to be the ones that see the most success.